Tristan stood to the tiller, and scanned the strange coast under his hand. The wind freshened, the sail bellied from the mast, the toilers drew in their oars, and watched the coast-line rising from the foam. Like battlements of black marble, the cliffs towered above the blue shallows, with rocky pinnacle and forest spire smitten from the east with a glamour of gold. Precipice and wooded height were solitary as the sea itself. No tower crowned the headlands, no town lurked in the green shadows of the placid bays.
Rolf, old senator of the seas, stood forward in the prow, gazing at the line of heights. Straight to the east a narrow valley thrust upwards from the sea, walled on either hand with cliff and forest slope. Rolf hailed Tristan to the prow, and pointed with knotted finger to the shore.
“The Land of the Seven Streams, sir,” he said to him. “I know these cliffs of old. See yonder valley; the Silver Snake runs therein, a great river and a strong. The stars have steered us well. Hold for the opening in the cliffs; we can ride in over the bar.”
Running fast on the backs of the billows, they came to where a counter current beat upon the prow, fretting the sea into contending streams. It was where the river charged the tide. The galley swerved and faltered; the sail flapped against the mast.
“Out sweeps,” came Rolf’s hail from the prow. “Pull, lads; ware rocks to the north. The passage lies ahead.”
With the sail lowered and much straining of oars, they swung in past the rocky barriers where the waves chafed and broke in foam. The great cliffs towered upon either hand, solemn and stupendous, tufted with dwarf oaks, topped with pines. Once within the inlet, the galley ran smoothly on the broad bosom of the river, whose curves smote landwards into forest gloom.
The men rested on their oars while Tristan climbed into the prow and stood beside Rolf the seaman, looking forth over crag and forest. No plume of smoke ascended to the sky, no roofs shone out amid the green. The place was steeped in the grandeur of solitude, and there was no sound to break the silence save the perpetual plaining of the sea.
Tristan questioned the old man at his side; he had grown grey under many winter skies over stormy seas; his beard was as the foam below the bluff beak of a ship.
“Whence comes this river?” he asked him.
“Sir,” he answered, “this great river feeds upon the Seven Streams, and like a vast snake, takes them all into its belly. We have entered in at the sea gate of the land.”